I can remember back to when I was around 7 years old, and I was sitting in Hindi class (in Jaipur, India). We were learning antonyms in Hindi. The word ‘Aastik’ came up – a person who believes in God, the antonym to which is ‘Nastik’. That was my first realization that it was even possible to be a non-believer.
I had always assumed that God was omnipresent – watching me at all times and making sure I didn’t do anything bad. Back then, I was even scared of having any bad thoughts, as I believed God could read my mind.
On my way back home after that day in school, I distinctly remember asking my dad, how someone can be a non-believer, how is it possible that they don’t acknowledge the existence of God? I don’t remember what he replied.
The home I grew up in wasn’t too religious. However, God did creep unknowingly into every sphere of my daily life. Every evening after sunset, we weren’t allowed to turn on any lights in the house before a short prayer to God. We had to respect books, pens, pencils or anything that we use in school as they helped us get knowledge, which was equivalent to God. So dropping a book or a pencil was as good as disrespecting God, and if you ever did – you had to quickly pick it up and touch it to your forehead and then kiss it, or you risked getting shunned by the knowledge God. My parents weren’t strict about it, but we were expected to pray to God before we ate, before we slept and after shower in the morning. I don’t even remember what my beliefs were at that point. It wasn’t so much about religion, or Hinduism, or any particular God, it was just that I accepted the existence of God.
A few years later we moved to Kuwait. I had developed a keen interest in Astronomy, and so on my birthday, our family friends gifted me Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I remember the first thing I turned to when I started reading the book – the few colored pages in the middle of the book with photos. Photos of nebulas, galaxies, planets and the one that has been etched in my brain from the first time I saw it – two human footprints side by side, one is from Tanzania 3.6 million years ago and the other from the Moon. I remember being mesmerized by the book and just lost in the thoughts about the Universe, its size, its age… From that point, it wasn’t too long before my belief in God was gone.
My parents weren’t too hard on me, as I continued most of the practices I had developed since I was a child and they believed I was just going through a phase. That was right around the time we got our first computer and access to the internet. I remember spending hours surfing Astronomy websites, reading freely available lectures on Black-holes, Einstein, Physics…creating backup of my favorite astronomy photos on floppy drives… I still have my collection J
I remember when the Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars in ’97, for some odd reason, I felt, here it is, the concrete proof God doesn’t exist. I’m still not sure why. But from then on, my reasons for being an Atheist just grew. I took a lot of pleasure every-time I learned that a famous scientist was also an Atheist and debated religion every chance I got with an attitude of almost pity towards others who were still prisoners of religion.
Not until my university years did I become less militant and actually developed an interest in studying world religions. I also became a politics junkie. The more I read; I realized that by being so confident that only my views were right, I wasn’t much different from anyone else who is religious and confident they are the ones who are right. So I’m slightly more tolerant of other’s religion now.
I realize now that the skepticism that grew out of reading Cosmos has shaped my life since then, as repeatedly it has pushed me towards accepting the authority of a scientist or a scientific book/journal, more than that of my parents, my priest or any religious text.
Anurag
Canada
It appears that Anurag makes just one point:
”… the skepticism that grew out of reading Cosmos has shaped my life since then, as repeatedly it has pushed me towards accepting the authority of a scientist or a scientific book/journal, more than that of my parents, my priest or any religious text.”Summary: From the teen years, Scientism and Appeal to the Authority of scientists (primarily Sagan) are the reasons for leaving religion (Hindi).
6 comments:
No, he offered one other point that is actually pretty silly: "I remember when the Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars in ’97, for some odd reason, I felt, here it is, the concrete proof God doesn’t exist."
Really? A piece of machinery made it to Mars and that eliminated God?! lol...the philosophers and theologians will be shocked at this!
I don't mean for this to come off as sarcastic, but you can't help but at least chuckle at that.
"the philosophers and theologians will be shocked at this!"
In every survey I've seen; very few philosophers are theists.
http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Philosophy+faculty+or+PhD&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=coarse
Ansell,
"Philosophy" is a huge topic. That's like saying that someone who is good at "science" knows a lot about cosmology. Narrow the survey down to "philosophy of religion", those who specialize in the arguments for and against theism, and you'll find:
Accept or lean toward: theism 69.3%
Accept or lean toward: atheism 19.8%
Other 10.8%
And in my experience, several philosophers who do not specialize in philosophy of religion are in fact quite ignorant of the defenses of theism. Many of them, for example, pull out the old "if everything has a cause, then what caused God?" nonsense, exposing the fact that they know not a thing about cosmological arguments.
Philosophy of science = 5% theist. Higher than I thought!
Philosophers are pretty much by definition Atheist. Even the philosophers of religion. This is because Theists are theologians, not philosophers.
A philosopher wants no boundaries on his proclamations about reality, the mind, materialism, ethics, etc. Theism puts too much stress on philosophers, because it insists on absolutes under which thoughts are valid. There is no restriction which is acceptable to philosophers, though, so they conjure up all sorts of ungrounded stuff on their purported journey to truth, which along the way they reject.
Philosophers are a confused bunch, many of whom reject free will by exercising their free will to do so. It's been said somewhere that philosophers make claims about reality which they immediately defeat when they get on the bus to go home.
Most philosophers of science are a sorry bunch who start with Materialism as an axiom. Hence science need not prove Materialism since it is accepted axiomatically. And they are trying to soften up empiricism to make science into "whatever scientists do", which defeats the self-correction brag that empiricists love. Certain groups of scientists love that, since it frees them from the rigor which used to define science.
...reasons for leaving religion (Hindi).
Small correction:
Hindi is a language.
He rejected Hinduism.
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